English 130

• What to Expect from English 130
• A Student’s Guide to Reading Essay Assignments in English 130
• One Approach to Guiding Peer Response

What to Expect from English 130

The Academic Writing Program at Chico State helps prepare you to succeed in the variety of writing endeavors you’ll be asked to complete as a college student. Professors in the program try to gear you toward success in college-level writing primarily through English 130, the university’s required, general education writing course.

Writing as Inquiry

The goal of English 130 is for you to engage in writing that arises out of inquiries into subjects of interest to you. By “inquiry,” we mean posing a question you have about a subject and then using reading, writing, and research to help you find answers. In the university, “finding an answer” almost always involves learning what other people have said about the subject, assessing their positions, and entering these academic conversations with your own informed insights and ideas. This process of learning includes reading scholarly and popular publications, talking with peers and experts, analyzing the information you’ve gathered, and refining it through the drafting and editing process of formal essays. In English 130, this process will involve almost all your class time, as professors in our program are invested in how you gather and use your research to inform your writing.

Course Practices

English 130 introduces you to literacy practices that will aid you in writing across the disciplines. These practices include:

• reading texts critically and carefully;
• taking notes on sources in ways that will be useful when you draft and revise your papers;
• developing varied and effective research strategies;
• examining writing assignments from your professors closely and asking questions about them;
• planning your approach to these writing assignments;
• using research and grammar handbooks and other sources to edit your papers.

You will write frequently, and you will revise your writing extensively. It is not unusual for students in English 130 to write 6-8,000 words in the course of the semester. You are likely to have short written responses, or partial drafts of formal writing assignments, due on a weekly basis. In most sections of English 130, you will also write critiques of your peers’ writing in order to assist your classmates in the ongoing work of revision and to help you better understand the writing assignment itself.

The process of drafting an essay involves using writing to manage the ideas you gather and uncover during your research. As you’re learning about your subject of interest, your professor might ask you for any of the following:

• research logs, in which you reprint key quotations from sources and summarize information
• your own response to an articles you find; here you might counter specific points in an article or compare the perspectives of one author to another
• an annotated bibliography of all the sources you’ve found, where you cite the source according to specific formatting guidelines and give a thumbnail sketch of the argument for the reader.
• a proposal for a longer essay—an extended statement that tells your professor and peers about what you’ve learned and what kind of longer paper you plan to write.

These are just a few examples of the many different homework assignments that will help you prepare for writing formal essays. These assignments will make writing your formal essays much less stressful and difficult.

Resources to Support Your Writing

Your professor. Your professor will be available to address the specific needs you have during the research and writing process. English 130 professors should make the writing process feel neither mysterious nor worrisome, but like a natural culmination of the thinking you’ve been doing on a subject that has relevance to you.

Your classmates. During class, your peers will review and comment on your work regularly, as we mentioned above.

Your University Writing Center. The Writing Center is an excellent resource for your work in English 130 and for your writing projects throughout your time at Chico State.

Yourself. Our university provides excellent resources for first-year writers. But you are the person who will make the most of your learning in English 130 and in your other classes at Chico State.  You need to attend class regularly and complete all reading and writing assignments on time. You need to ask questions of your professor and your peers when you don’t understand something. You need to support your classmates in their writing by offering honest and constructive responses during class. You need to devote time and energy to your work in this and all your other courses. Supporting yourself is the most important thing you can do.

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